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Netanyahu's Speech at Trafalgar Square Rally pictures from the Rally for more speeches by Netanyahu press here London 6 May 2002 Friends of Israel, The history of Britain is distinguished by great stands against tyranny. If not for the steely resolve of the British people to resist powerful dictatorships, the course of human affairs would have taken a decidedly different turn. Today, Britain stands before another fork in the road of history. It must choose, along with the other free nations, between two opposing paths: the path of appeasing terror, or the path of confronting it. The path of appeasing terror entices those who embark on it with what seems like a quick and painless passage. Yet paved with flawed logic and false hopes, it leads only to defeat and despair. The path of confronting terror, by contrast, is strewn with evident dangers. But armed with moral clarity, those who pursue it will overcome its perils and end their journey in triumph and hope. Six decades ago, Britain rejected the path of appeasing tyranny and chose to bravely confront the Nazi evil. But that choice was far from preordained. At first, the forces of appeasement were too strong and Winston Churchill’s warnings fell on deaf ears. But once the people of Britain recognized the threat that Nazism posed to the world, they rose to the challenge and served as a bulwark against that diseased militancy. This courageous British stand enabled the forces of liberty, led by the United States, to regroup and summon the strength to roll back an evil that endangered our civilization. Today, history has placed the people of Israel on the front line in a war against another pathological evil that threatens our entire world – the evil of terrorism. And like the people of Britain sixty decades ago, the people of Israel are bravely rising to the challenge. A Churchillian spirit is animating my nation today. The forces of appeasement in the Jewish State are in retreat, and the forces committed to confronting terrorism are now ascendant. Subjected to an unprecedented series of savage and deliberate attacks against innocent civilians, the people of Israel have dug in their heels and are determined to fight. The question now is not whether Israel will fight – for we have no choice but to fight - but whether Israel will have to fight alone. Will the free nations of the world support a beleaguered democracy or will they succumb to the sophistry of the apologists of terror? Today, the apologists of terror, and even some genuine friends of Israel, argue that Israel must negotiate with Arafat. They tell us that while the democratic world stands with us in our fight against terror, we must nonetheless come to terms with Arafat, who they say is the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people. This is absurd. Imagine how the people of Britain would have felt if the free world would have told them that while they stand with them in the fight against Nazism, Britain would nonetheless have to come to terms with Hitler, the legitimate leader of the German people. The people of Britain knew then that the road to peace with Germany did not go through Hitler or around Hitler, but over Hitler. His Nazi regime had to be dismantled if there were to be any hope for peace. Likewise, the people of Israel know that the path toward peace with the Palestinians does not go through Arafat, nor around Arafat, but over Arafat. Yasser Arafat was, is, and will always be a terrorist. His regime has got to be dismantled! He has got to go if there is to be any genuine peace! Arafat came to power illegitimately and he exercises power illegitimately. His election was neither free nor fair. Controlling 100% of the Palestinian press, intimidating all potential opposition, an Arafat dictatorship was brutally imposed on the Palestinian people, while the democratic world stood silent, swept up in the euphoria of a phony peace. But even had Arafat been freely elected, his carefully orchestrated campaign of terror over the last twenty months has shred any ounce of legitimacy he might have had. Every day, in Arabic, a Palestinian media fully under Arafat’s control preaches the doctrine of policide – the destruction of a state – through the means of suicide -- suicide and mass terror. Every day, in their schools and mosques Palestinians are told that their goal is not a Palestinian state next to Israel, but a Palestinian state instead of Israel. In live broadcasts to his people Arafat calls for a million martyrs against Israel. He runs suicide kindergarten camps, suicide universities and suicide museums that glorify a culture of death and wanton murder. And people want to give this man a state. That is nothing short of madness. No Palestinian has more innocent blood on his hands than Arafat. Given an invoice for a suicide bomber, Arafat crossed out the sum and demanded in his own handwriting that the bill be reduced in half. As was noted by one astute observer, not only is Arafat a terrorist. He’s a cheap terrorist! Arafat may be a cheap terrorist, but he is a shrewd terrorist. The main difference between Arafat and Osama bin Alden is that Arafat is a bin Laden with good PR. He employs a team of con-artists who whitewash his evil deeds in the western media. These spokesmen for terror brazenly demanded a UN factfinding commission to investigate a phony massacre in Jenin, the main base of Palestinian terror, a place where our soldiers were asked to engage in perilous house to house combat in order to minimize civilian casualties. Of course, the UN – the same UN which withheld videotaped evidence of the Hezbollah kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, and whose Security Council will soon be chaired by that esteemed champion of liberty, the Republic of Syria. The UN never thought to investigate Arafat’s complicity in the endless number of proven massacres in Israeli cafes, discos, pizza shops, and hotels, including the horrific carnage on Passover eve carried out by Yasser Arafat’s goons. Imagine a UN fact-finding commission on American and British action in Kandahar - demanded by Al Qaeda no less --and you can get a sense of the theater of the absurd we were treated to over the last few weeks. What everyone knows - that terrorists both deliberate kill civilians and deliberately hide behind civilians, seeking immunity from their crimes – is apparently too difficult a concept for the UN to grasp. Instead, it willingly submits to the lies of Arafat’s con-men. But even these professional con-artists are occasionally caught red-handed. Last week we watched with amusement how, during a funeral procession, a Palestinian corpse was accidentally dropped by stretcher-bearers and how lo and behold, the corpse suddenly got up and ran away. It was all a fake. I guess somebody forgot to tell the martyr that he was dead. Let me be clear. With a murderous and fraudulent regime such as Arafat’s, it is impossible to make peace. Only with a new Palestinian leadership that abandons terror and abandons the goal of destroying Israel can we negotiate a genuine peace – a peace for which we all years, pray and dream. Indeed, every time Israel was faced with an Arab leader, like Anwar Sadat and King Hussein, who genuinely wanted peace, and spoke peace to his people -- Israel made peace. But with Arafat there can be no peace, because he doesn’t want peace. Instead of becoming a Palestinian King Hussein, as many had hoped, he has turned out to be a Palestinian Sadaam Hussein. And what do you do with Sadaam Hussein? Do you negotiate with him? Do you placate him? Do you make concessions to him? No, you throw him out. And just as America and Britain must, and will throw out Sadaam Hussein, Israel must ---- and will --- throw out Yasser Arafat. Now that Arafat’s terror is being steadily unmasked, the appeasers of terror are left with one last argument in their arsenal. It may be true, they say, that Arafat runs a terrorist regime, but eliminating that regime will not eliminate terror. For the root cause of terror, they claim, is the deprivation of national and civic rights. Address that deprivation, they say, and you will end terror. Well, I suppose you could make that argument to a people whose sense of history extends to breakfast. For in modern times there have been countless struggles for national independence and civic rights. If terror is indeed rooted in the absence of rights, we would have expected to see countless examples of terrorism accompanying these struggles. But we do not. Mahatma Ghandi fought for the independence of India without resorting to terrorism. So too did the people of Eastern Europe in their struggle to bring down the Berlin Wall. And Martin Luther King’s campaign for equal rights for American eschewed all violence, much less terrorism. And we, the Jewish people, in our struggle for an independent Jewish State did not resort to terrorism. Sure, they may have called us terrorists. But terrorism is only defined by the nature of the act itself, by the question of whether civilians are deliberately targeted. The Jewish underground movement did everything in its power to prevent civilian casualties. They pulled civilians off trains that were to be blown up. They telephoned the British before attacking military barracks so that the lives of soldiers would be spared. They did not target women, children and non-combatants, nor of course, did they ever blow up buses, coffee houses and shops in London. In the countless actions taken by the entire Jewish underground, you will not find even a handful of attacks that targeted civilians. Maybe one or two at most. In striking contrast, if you look at the thousands of attacks of Arab groups, you will see the undeniable target of these murderous terrorist groups are civilians. If the deprivation of rights is indeed the root cause of terrorism, why did all these people pursue their cause without resorting to terror. Put simply, because they were democrats, not terrorists. They believed in the sanctity of human life, were committed to the ideal of liberty and championed the values of democracy. But those who practice terrorism do not believe in these things. In fact, they believe in the very opposite. For them, the cause they espouse is so all encompassing, so total, that it justifies anything. It allows them to break any law, discard any moral code and trample all human rights into the dust. There is a name for the doctrine that produces this evil. It is called totalitarianism. Indeed the root cause of terror is totalitarianism. Only a totalitarian regime, by systematically brainwashing its subjects, can indoctrinate hordes of killers to suspend all moral constraints for the sake of a twisted cause. That is why from its inception, totalitarianism has always been wedded to terrorism – from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to the Ayatollahs to Sadaam Hussein, to Osama bin Laden, to Yasser Arafat. It is not merely that the goals of terrorists do not justify the means they choose. It is that the means they choose tell us what their true goals are. Osama bin Laden is not seeking to defend the rights of Muslins but to murder as many Americans as possible, and ultimately to destroy America and the West. Sadaam Hussein is not seeking to defend his people but to subjugate his neighbors. Arafat is not seeking to build a state, but to destroy a state. Arafat established the PLO in 1964 not to liberate the so-called occupied territories. After all, the entire West Bank and all of the Gaza strip were under Arab sovereignty in 1964. No, Arafat established the PLO to pursue his unchanging objective: the destruction of Israel – any Israel, of any size in any boundary. Those who fight as terrorists rule as terrorists. People who deliberately target the innocent never become leaders who protect freedom and human rights. When terrorists seize power, they invariably set up the darkest dictatorships – whether in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, or Arafatistan. In short, the reason why some resort to terror and others do not is not any any absence of rights, but the presence of a tyrannical mindset. The coupling of this fanatical mindset with weapons of mass destruction is the greatest danger facing our world. If the regimes and terror organizations spawned by this mad militancy are allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, they will use them with no hesitation and no concern for themselves, let alone their enemies. And if Arafat’s factory of human bombs is not shut down, it is only a matter of time before this technique spreads to your cafes, to your pizza shops, to your supermarkets –- just as Arafat’s pioneering of airline hijackings quickly spread to the entire world. If not stopped today, the suicide bombers of tomorrow will carry suitcase devices of mass death to New York, to Washington and yes, to London. As Prime Minister Blair has said, we either defeat terror or be defeated by it. The terrorists and the terrorist regimes must be stopped. The Taliban has gone, Sadaam has to go. Arafat must go. My friends, Sixty years ago, Europe did not lift a finger to save millions of Jews who were butchered on its soil by a mass killer. Today, there are many in Europe who shamelessly side with the new mass killers, who seek to destroy the Jews and their state. And what’s even worse, they condemn Israel for taking legitimate action to defend itself. To them I say: History’s shame will again be upon you. To European governments that are squeamishly allowing attacks against their Jewish citizens to go unanswered, I say: Stand up and take action --- Now!! For you should know that the Jews are merely the first target of these fanatics. But I assure you, they are not the last. Anti-Jewish violence may begin with the Jews, but it never ends with them. This too must be stopped. Now!! My dear friends, The choice that lies before all free societies is clear - to choose between appeasing terror and confronting it. The people of Israel, like the people of Britain many decades ago, have made their choice. We have chosen to confront evil. We have chosen to live and not to die. We have chose to fight. And we have chosen to win. Let us hope that every free nation follows Israel’s example and joins us in eradicating terror from the face of the earth. Let us hope that we will summon the wisdom to refute the apologists of terror. And let us hope that we will summon the courage to secure a peaceful tomorrow. |
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